A COMPETITION OF ENERGY EFFICIENCY PROTOTYPES IN DIGITAL ELECTRONICS SUBJECT

Attending to the Bologna Process and the European Higher Education Space criteria as well as their common goals to improve the European Higher Education and the employability of our students, a new educational experience has been developed. This innovative experience consists of carrying out a series of competitive strategies among the students of the subject "Digital Electronics" that belongs to the matter "Industrial Electronics" in the Degree of Electronics and Automation" given at the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (UPV). The motivation of this experience is to make the students acquire some specific skills such as "the ability to solve problems with initiative, making decisions, creativity, critical thinking and communication and knowledge transfer". All these skills must be acquired in the Industrial Engineering matters. In this way, the students that are attending the subject in the present year (2012-2013) have been involved in a competition experience in order to build the most energy-efficient prototype to a specific application. The idea is to develop a competition on equal terms between the participating groups, based on a set of basic standards and specifications for the prototype to be built. In the particular case of the developed experience in this course, students were invited to take part in groups of 4 people. They were told that the aim of the competition was to build a solar energy generation prototype, managed by a microcontroller and based on the same mini Solar panel model. Thus, they were given a term of two months to construct the model. Next, the models will be exhibited and the competition will start by checking the efficiency of each presented prototype. These prototypes will be ranked later according to their efficiency and then, the best three ones would be rewarded with electronic and computer equipment besides the assessment attending to their efficiency, originality, presentation and applicability. This assessment will be done, not only by the staff of the course, but also considering the opinion surveys to the students that take part in the competition. This experience is based on other more basic carried out in previous courses and seems to be kindly accepted by the students that are taking part massively in it and it is a very good indicator of the interest in this activity. Moreover, in order to complement the activity assessment, students are told to fulfill a survey to assess its suitability and interest to achieve the intended objectives. In the end, the feedback received on previous experiences has been very positive and this encourages us to continue with this kind of activities in the classroom.